Christian Art | Jesus With The Children | Jesus, God, Is Love
Office Of Readings | Week 1, Tuesday, Ordinary Time | A Reading From The Longer Rules Of Saint Basil The Great | We Possess An Inborn Power Of Loving
‘The ability to love is within each of us.’
In this reading from the Longer Rules for Monks, Saint Basil the Great reflects on the origin of love for God and its place in the moral life. Basil’s starting point is significant: love of God is not presented as something imposed from outside or learned through instruction alone. Instead, Basil argues that the capacity to love God is already present within human nature.
Basil compares love of God to basic human inclinations such as the desire for life, light, and familial affection. These are not learned behaviours but natural tendencies rooted in human existence. In the same way, love for God belongs to the structure of human reason itself. When human beings come into existence, they receive a rational capacity that includes an orientation towards the good and, ultimately, towards God.
The role of God’s law and teaching is therefore not to create this love, but to cultivate and direct it. Basil uses the image of a seed: reason contains the potential for love, while divine instruction nurtures it so that it can grow to maturity. Grace does not replace human capacity but brings it to fulfilment.
This understanding allows Basil to make a further claim about moral responsibility. Because God has already given human beings the ability to obey his commands, these commands cannot be dismissed as unfair or impossible. Sin, in Basil’s definition, is not the absence of ability but the misuse of the powers God has given. Virtue, by contrast, is the right use of those same powers, guided by conscience and obedience.
Love fits squarely within this framework. The command to love God presupposes that human beings are already capable of doing so. Basil points to everyday experience as evidence: people naturally desire what appears good, feel affection for those close to them, and respond with goodwill to benefactors. Love of God, though it surpasses all other loves, grows from the same created capacity.
The final emphasis of the reading falls on purification. While the capacity for love is universal, its full expression depends on freedom from sin. Only a purified soul can perceive the beauty of God clearly and experience the intensity of desire that Basil describes. Divine beauty itself remains beyond description, but its effect on the human soul is unmistakable: it draws love toward its true end.
A Reading From The Longer Rules Of Saint Basil The Great | We Possess An Inborn Power Of Loving
Love of God is not something that can be taught. We did not learn from someone else how to rejoice in light or want to live, or to love our parents or guardians. It is the same – perhaps even more so – with our love for God: it does not come by another’s teaching. As soon as the living creature (that is, man) comes to be, a power of reason is implanted in us like a seed, containing within it the ability and the need to love. When the school of God’s law admits this power of reason, it cultivates it diligently, skilfully nurtures it, and with God’s help brings it to perfection.
For this reason, as by God’s gift, I find you with the zeal necessary to attain this end, and you on your part help me with your prayers. I will try to fan into flame the spark of divine love that is hidden within you, as far as I am able through the power of the Holy Spirit.
First, let me say that we have already received from God the ability to fulfil all his commands. We have then no reason to resent them, as if something beyond our capacity were being asked of us. We have no reason either to be angry, as if we had to pay back more than we had received. When we use this ability in a right and fitting way, we lead a life of virtue and holiness. But if we misuse it, we fall into sin.
This is the definition of sin: the misuse of powers given us by God for doing good, a use contrary to God’s commands. On the other hand, the virtue that God asks of us is the use of the same powers based on a good conscience in accordance with God’s command.
Since this is so, we can say the same about love. Since we received a command to love God, we possess from the first moment of our existence an innate power and ability to love. The proof of this is not to be sought outside ourselves, but each one can learn this from himself and in himself. It is natural for us to want things that are good and pleasing to the eye, even though at first different things seem beautiful and good to different people. In the same way, we love what is related to us or near to us, though we have not been taught to do so, and we spontaneously feel well disposed to our benefactors.
What, I ask, is more wonderful than the beauty of God? What thought is more pleasing and wonderful than God’s majesty? What desire is as urgent and overpowering as the desire implanted by God in a soul that is completely purified of sin and cries out in its love: I am wounded by love? The radiance of divine beauty is altogether beyond the power of words to describe.
Christian Prayer With Jesus Christ
God of all goodness,
You have placed within us the capacity to love,
and you call us to direct that love toward you.
Purify our hearts,
so that the love you have planted within us
may grow according to your will.
Teach us to use rightly the gifts you have given,
to turn away from misuse and sin,
and to walk in obedience and freedom.
Through your Spirit,
bring to fulfilment the love
you have already begun in us.
Amen
Glossary Of Christian Terms
Love of God | The innate human capacity and calling to desire and seek God as the highest good.
Reason | The God-given faculty through which human beings recognise truth, goodness, and order.
Seed | An image used by Basil to describe the implanted potential for love within human nature.
Divine law | God’s instruction that guides and cultivates what is already present in human reason.
Grace | God’s help that brings human capacity to fulfilment rather than replacing it.
Virtue | The right use of God-given powers in obedience to his commands.
Sin | The misuse of human abilities in a way contrary to God’s will.
Conscience | The inner judgement by which a person discerns right and wrong action.
Purification | The removal of sin and disorder so that the soul may perceive God clearly.
Beauty of God | God’s goodness and majesty, which draw the human soul toward love.
Commandment | God’s instruction, which presupposes the ability to respond.
Human nature | The created structure of the human person, including reason and freedom.
Holy Spirit | The divine agent through whom love is stirred, strengthened, and perfected.
Desire | The natural movement of the human will toward what is perceived as good.
Obedience | The free alignment of human action with God’s will.
Freedom | The capacity to act rightly by using God’s gifts according to their purpose.
Good | That which is fitting to human nature and ultimately fulfilled in God.
Divine beauty | The source of love’s attraction, beyond full description but known by its effect.
Innate capacity | The inborn ability placed in human beings by God to love and respond to him.
Perfection | The fulfilment of human potential through grace and right use of reason.
Sometimes, when I read my Bible, I pause in the reading and say to myself: ‘This bit’s real.’ It would be fair to say, I have issues with Mary, because, contrary to what we are taught to say, Mary isn’t my mother. Rather: Mum is. One bit of the Bible-text says this: And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for people were saying, “He is beside himself.” … And his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside they sent to him and called him. And a crowd was sitting about him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers are outside, asking for you.” And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.” (Mark 3: 21; 31-35.) Here she comes. She is in considerable distress. I can imagine that. I can relate to that. To save her boy from whatever he’s got himself into this time. And you’re not telling me there isn’t something inside that. Her boy is beside himself. Radical. Radicalized. Radicalizing. A misunderstood word. /ˈradɪk(ə)l/ adjective & noun. 1 Forming the root, basis, or foundation; original, primary. 2a Inherent in the nature of a thing or person; fundamental. b Of action, change, an idea: going to the root or origin; far-reaching, thorough. c Advocating thorough or far-reaching change. d Characterized by departure from tradition; progressive; unorthodox. ‘He has a demon! And he is mad!’ – thus ‘the Jews’. (e.g. John 10: 20.) Come home! It’s all she wants. His family want him back now. But it is an exclusive cult: there is an inside and there is an outside; and on the outside, they are not meant to understand, lest they be converted. He has defined himself as different from anything she was. Only at the end does Jesus say to his Mum – and with savage, bitter irony: ‘Woman, behold your son.’ And then he dies. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. We ask that we might find Mary in our hearts as a Yes! place for Jesus. It is also recommended that we pray to Jesus that we may be further in oneness with Mary. It is self-emptying, such that we only exist insofar as we are responsive to God’s Word. * Last term, and put-out to pasture, the old Archbishop Emeritus came over to stay for a few days and did the odd class with us. He spoke of Yes! as the meaning of Mary’s virginity. And we were not very nice about him. One or two took umbrage. One or two got the hump. In a sense, his Grace, the Arch, basically wanted to move anyone he’d ever known from a high-place – a mountain – received theological ‘truth’ – to an imminent, human plane. Earthing the spiritual. Recalibrating metrics of life’s believability toward a spiritual sense of things. He might have asked the impermissible question: what happened? His Grace described it. God’s love as a cloud. This descended upon Mary – and subsumed her. Within the cloud, Mary capitulated utterly. She became only and purely a response to God’s love. As he spoke, the Arch cradled her. He carried her in his lap – in his hands. His Grace was a consecrated bishop. He was faith. He sat squat, a rounded man, hands cupped and ankles crossed, fingers interlocked, with parted thighs. Rumpled, washed, speckled. A lifetime’s skin… There could be no doubt His Grace spoke through long-term personal relationship with Mary. It was Julian went for him: ‘So are you saying Mary was a Virgin? Or are you not saying Mary was a Virgin?’ Nasty. No, it wasn’t pretty. Julian twisting his silver ring. For a moment, what Julian had said to the Arch simply failed to communicate. No, for a moment, that dumped on the air meant nothing. Then His Grace said: ‘There is a range of possible meanings we may understand in the question of Mary’s virginity. For example, there are understandings of the word virginity entailed in the action of giving birth.’ Julian said: ‘Duh! So had she had sex or hadn’t she?’ Trigger words. No, it wasn’t pretty. On that went for a little while. At length, Julian’s point seemed reluctantly conceded. Then the Arch told us a new story, an additionally human event, the more to baffle us. Controversially, he told us that Mary could not have been Joseph’s first wife, for this would not have been the way of things in the society of that time. His belief was that Joseph must have taken Mary into his household through pity. That would be normal, he said, for Joseph to bring a young, vulnerable girl, who is about to have a baby, within his protection, not meaning to enjoy with her marital relations, but through kindness. ‘And this story of the inn and stable,’ the Archbishop said, ‘it can’t have been like that really. Joseph has travelled with Mary to stay with his family, at home in Bethlehem, and they don’t want Mary in their house, for reasons which I am sure we can understand. It must have been there was considerable resistance to Mary. But Mary gives birth, and who can resist a baby? That’s what happened. It must have been. ‘I’m convinced that must have been how it happened really.’ Later that term, toward the beginning of Advent, we met boys who had been here before, in Valladolid, and now were in regular seminary. They had heard and recited verbatim all the Archbishop had said to them. Their spot-on impressions of each of the fathers were scathing. […]
Saint Augustine addresses the duty of pastors to speak the truth even when that truth provokes resistance, and he warns the flock to distinguish between authoritative teaching and faulty example. He draws on Ezekiel’s imagery of negligent shepherds and on the watchman motif (Ezekiel 3:17–21): a pastor who fails to warn sinners bears responsibility for their ruin; a pastor who speaks the prophetic word but the people ignore it has done his duty [ … ]
In this portion of his treatise, Saint Cyprian of Carthage underscores the profoundly communal nature of Christian prayer, especially as it is expressed in the Our Father. Writing in the mid-third century amidst persecution and internal divisions, Cyprian offers not only theological reflection but also pastoral guidance on the meaning and practice of unity in prayer [ … ]
